the defense of poetry is inseparable from the defense of freedom

“I'm not a historian or a sociologist or a political scientist: I am a poet. My writings in prose are closely associated with my literary vocation and my artistic preferences. I prefer to speak of Marcel Duchamp or Juan Ramon Jimenes than of Locke and Montesquieu. Political philosophy has always interested me, but I never tried nor would try to write a book about justice, freedom or the art of government. Nevertheless, I published many essays and articles on the state of democracy in our time: the external and internal dangers that threatened and continue to threaten it, the doubts and ordeals it faces.”
- Octavio Paz

Paz was passionate about freedom, because, as he stated in his acceptance speech of the Tocqueville Award in 1989, he early on understood that the defense of poetry is inseparable from the defense of freedom and that the latter, in a dialectic of complementariness, requires democracy: “Without freedom democracy is despotism; without democracy freedom is a chimera.”
- Octavio Paz

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